Not So Fast: UK Govt. does 24 hour flip-flop on vaccine passports - will keep them in reserve

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UK gov’t goes back and forth on vaccine passports, will keep them ‘in reserve’

‘I think you’ve got to be prudent and you’ve got to keep things in reserve in case things change,’ Prime Minister Boris Johnson said.

Mon Sep 13, 2021
LONDON (LifeSiteNews) — The U.K. dropped plans to require a vaccine passport for night clubs and large venues less than a week after first confirming them. Still, passport measures may come back on the agenda for the winter.

U.K. Health Secretary Sajid Javid told the BBC on Sunday he was “pleased to announce” that the British government will “not be going ahead” with plans for vaccine passports. A week earlier, Javid had announced that vaccine passports would be introduced “as early as October” to make sure the “whole economy remains open.” 

Both Javid and Prime Minister Boris Johnson said plans for a vaccine passport should be kept “in reserve” in case “things change.” 

The British government has been going back and forth on plans for a vaccine passport for months. In December 2020, Minister for Covid Vaccine Deployment Nadhim Zahawi said twice that he had “no plans to introduce so-called vaccine passporting,” and urged businesses “not to even think about [it].”

In spite of this, vaccine passports were introduced in May of this year, and in July, Boris Johnson announced they would be required from the end of September in order to gain access to night clubs and other venues where large crowds gather. At the time, he even warned that “proof of a negative test [would] no longer be sufficient.” Zahawi confirmed this only last Tuesday, saying vaccine passports would be required to enter night clubs and other large venues from October. 

On Sunday, however, Javid told Sky News, “Instinctively, I don’t like the idea at all of people having to present papers to do basic things.”

He repeated this statement on the BBC the same day. “Most people instinctively don’t like the idea,” he said. “I’ve never liked the idea of saying to people ‘you must show your papers’ to do what is an everyday activity.”

The health secretary then announced, “I’m pleased to say that we will not be going ahead with plans for vaccine passports.” 

The BBC host at this point asked Javid for confirmation and qualified the change as “baffling for people.”

Javid confirmed that “we will not be going ahead” and replied that he and the other ministers had been “absolutely right to look at [this measure],” but that the decision should “be looked at in combination with other measures.” He also explained that many countries who had gone ahead with the vaccine passport had done so in an effort to boost their vaccination rates, whereas the U.K. had been “very successful with [its] vaccination rates so far.”

This latest change comes after heavy backlash from conservative MPs who qualified the measure as “unsupportable, coercive and discriminatory.”

On the same day, Javid also announced a possible lift of PCR testing requirements for travelers and people on vacation in the near future.

“I want to try and get rid of that as soon as I possibly can,” he told Sky News. “I’m not going to make that decision right now, but I’ve already asked officials that the moment we can, let’s get rid of these kinds of intrusions.” The Health Secretary also vowed not to keep “anything like that in place for a second longer than is absolutely necessary.”

On Sunday, both Javid and Johnson hinted at the possibility of vaccine passports making a comeback if deemed necessary. 

Johnson said, “Sajid Javid, the health secretary, and Nadhim Zahawi, the vaccines minister, are both right. What we want to do is avoid vaccine passports if we possibly can, and that’s the course we’re on.”

“But I think you’ve got to be prudent and you’ve got to keep things in reserve in case things change,” he added.

Javid similarly said the government “should keep it in reserve as a potential option …”

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UK Government Says Vaccine Passports Integral To COVID Winter Plan Day After They Were Supposedly Scrapped

ZH | SEP 14, 2021 - 02:00 AM
Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,

The UK government has insisted that vaccine passports will remain an integral tool in fighting the spread of COVID just a day after health secretary Sajid Javid asserted that they had been completely scrapped.

Well, that didn’t take long.

During his media rounds yesterday morning, Javid said that vaccine passports represented a “huge intrusion into people’s lives,” adding, “I am pleased to say that we will not be going ahead.”

However, within 24 hours, the government has indicated that the system will in fact form a “first-line defence” against a winter wave of coronavirus.

“No 10 said checks on the vaccine status of people going to nightclubs and other crowded events remained a crucial part of the government’s winter Covid plan due to be unveiled by the prime minister tomorrow,” reports the Times.

It appears as though the only change is that the passports won’t be introduced at the end of this month, appearing instead during early winter when COVID cases will inevitably and conveniently begin to rise again.

Mark Harper, chairman of the Covid Recovery Group, said of vaccine passports: “They shouldn’t be kept in reserve — they are pointless, damaging and discriminatory.”

Trusting government pronouncements on vaccine passports is a fool’s game.

At the end of last year, the British public were assured that they would never come into force, even as the government was paying millions of pounds to private contractors to set up the system.

As we previously highlighted, vaccine passports will put nightclubs out of business because they operate at a net profit margin of 15 per cent, while one third of under 40’s in the UK haven’t had a single dose of the vaccine.

Boris Johnson will also signal that he won’t hesitate to re-introduce mask mandates in winter if cases numbers significantly increase, which they are sure to do given that the UK counts ‘COVID deaths’ as any that occurred within a 28 day COVID diagnosis no matter what the cause of the death.

As we have repeatedly highlighted, vaccine passports represent a digital ID, which represents the implementation of an onerous social credit score system in the west.